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Wednesday, August 10, 2016

In this episode, we enter the opera house to enjoy the show... and murder some people!

In order to elaborate a point I made in the episode, this game operates on a "realistic surrealism". What I meant by that is that the things that Agent 47 can do are completely absurd in the context of real life. There's no way that his disguises should work, and many of the props in the game (like the over-sized laundry bins and trash cans) are deliberately created out of proportion to facilitate gameplay.

That said, there is a internal consistency with our actions. Even though the disguise mechanic is crazy, we can believe that Agent 47 is skilled enough to pass himself off as someone who belongs there. It's an abstraction, but it's a plausible enough abstraction and it creates enough fun opportunities that no one will notice or mind. A lot of game suspends or alters what one would expect of reality to facilitate the feeling of being a master assassin, and that's largely why the game works.

As to the point about the game making you think like an assassin through repetition, I said I got that from an article. However, it was actually a video. Weirdly enough, Sam linked to me a few days after I recorded this episode. I had already seen it, but he did save me the trouble of having to find it again.